Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's biggest Internet company by sales, and Sina Corp, which operates China's most popular micro-blogging service, both modified the structures of their organizations in the past year.

"Chinese Internet companies have realized they cannot remain the same when so many changes are taking place in the industry, such as the increasing popularity of mobile Internet," said Xie Wen, a Chinese IT expert and former president of Yahoo China, which is a part of Alibaba.

He said the decision to change subsidiaries into business units suggests that Alibaba might be seeking to list its entire group.

Last May, Alibaba regained boardroom control from Yahoo Inc, formerly its biggest shareholder, buying back as much as half of Yahoo's previous stake. Incentives included in the deal to encourage Alibaba to go public are scheduled to expire by December 2015.

Alibaba said it has no plans to seek a public listing.

Qiu Lin, an Internet stock analyst at Guosen Securities Co Ltd in Hong Kong, said the company's latest decision to create so many business units may "make coordinating among the different business arms more difficult and increase management costs".

Ma said the recent restructuring is just a beginning and further changes will come in subsequent years.

From the start of 2012 to Nov 30, the value of transactions on Taobao.com and Tmall.com, the two online shopping arms of Alibaba, came to 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion), an amount equal to about 2 percent of China's GDP in 2011.

For Nov 11, a day on which Alibaba holds an annual promotion, the two websites reported sales of 19.1 billion yuan. That was more than one and a half times the value of online sales recorded in the United States on so-called Cyber Monday, or Nov 26, the day following Thanksgiving weekend.

Contact the writer at chenlimin@chinadaily.com.cn

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